He mused, managing with some effort to achieve the appearance of someone truly intrigued by a new idea. “Not allowed. Well, indeed! Remarkable. When I think how many times I have told someone to tell someone else to do something that needs doing, and that person claims never to have heard a word about it! A chain of information. What a very good idea!” He turned away, smiling secretly to himself. His chief work in the abbey, as he saw it, was to make sure that the abbot did not know nine-tenths of what went on and that no chain of information ever connected to himself.
It turned out the abbot was available. Precious Wind spent three minutes with him, explaining what she had called the chain of information.
“Four or five days,” he said, nodding. “Well, I hope you have an enjoyable ride and get some help. I’m very disturbed by this whole matter.” He was, in fact, even more disturbed by the “chain of information” idea, which Precious Wind had somehow managed to explain two or three times during a very brief meeting. It had made him realize, quite suddenly, that most of what he knew about the abbey came to him from others, and this had led him to a related, very disturbing thought: What I know about my abbey is told to me by others, or perhaps it is not told to me by others when it should be! What is there that I do not know?
“If I had been the abbot,” Precious Wind informed Oldwife, “I think I’d have been more interested in knowing who was to be told that someone rather important to Tingawa had been abducted from my abbey. I got the impression he was very distracted about something else.”
Early next morning, she packed a few things in her saddlebags, tied on several anonymous bundles, put her bow and half a dozen arrows in their case, picked the liveliest of the Wold horses from the stables, and went out into the yard. She made a slight detour along the stable where the abbey horses were kept and noted the uniform sets of tack and saddles outside the stalls. Most of the abbey’s horses, she imagined, were with the troops, wherever they were stationed, but still there were a few hundred riding animals and as many heavy horses to haul wagons. When she arrived at the gate, she bid the guards good morning and asked what the procedure was for using an abbey horse.
“Some elder brother or sister signs the chit, and that’s it,” she was told.
She rode out to the road that led toward Benjobz Inn. Since the inn was at least four days’ ride away and she had said she’d be back in more or less that time, since she had made people as suspicious of her journey as possible, she felt it likely she would be followed. Someone would want to know who in the wild forest and valleys north of the abbey was getting information from this Tingawan woman. Evading followers would be no problem. Secretly finding out what they had been told to do might be more difficult.
Midafternoon, having stopped along the way no more than was necessary, she started searching the road for fresh hoofprints. About a mile farther on she found a well-traveled track coming in from the left and fresh hoof marks continuing north. All those would hide the fact that she was leaving the road. She took her own horse off to the right, then went back to erase the few prints that might have interested followers. Leading the horse across the grasses, she went back into the forest to find a lookout, a fairly comfortable branch halfway up a large nut tree that gave her a view some miles back the way she had come. She shared the nuts and some fruit from her saddlebags with a tribe of squirrels, staying aloft long enough to make her think she might have misjudged the situation. She was about to climb down when she saw three horsemen coming far more briskly than necessary this late in the day. As they topped a hill, the foremost among them galloped ahead, reined in, and stood tall in his stirrups to see as far ahead as he could. At the distance it was hard to be sure, but the tack and saddles looked very much like those issued by the abbey.
Well and well, she thought. If those aren’t followers they are giving a very fair impression of such. She climbed down, stood quietly beside her horse, which was busy dining on grass, and waited until hooves had passed and faded into silence down the road before she returned to the road herself.
She stayed well behind until dark, then stopped and walked on along the roadside, leading the horse, looking for a campfire. Considering the fresh hoofprints she had found, they might have found someone else’s camp where they could stop. Or, she hoped, they might have given up that idea and built one of their own.
Not much later she saw the fire in a sheltered dell off to the left. She picketed the horse between two trees near two huge stones—a landmark she could not miss even in the dark—before making her way toward the flame. She slipped among the trees until she found one to stand behind where she could see three men and three unsaddled horses tied to a picket line near a campfire.
The trees were good cover; she could get close enough
